Emission characteristics of gated silicon wedges

Author

Barry, J.D. ; McGruer, Nicol E. ; Warner, K. ; Bintz, W.J. ; Nagras, A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA, USA

Volume

14

Issue

2

fYear

1993

Firstpage

83

Lastpage

84

Abstract

Gated field emission wedges of varying lengths have been fabricated and tested. These wedges emit at 180-200 V from multiple emission sites that are approximately evenly distributed along the wedge. This results in emission currents that scale with the length of the wedge. The maximum emission current observed is about 0.1 mu A/ mu m of wedge length, beyond which localized failure events occur. These localized failure events sometimes cause the wedge emitter to short to the gate, but frequently the emission characteristic of the wedge is not seriously affected as long as most of the wedge remains intact. A single wedge may undergo up to hundreds of individual failures and still emit.<>

Keywords

elemental semiconductors; silicon; vacuum microelectronics; 180 to 200 V; Si; elemental semiconductor; field emission wedges; gated Si wedges; localized failure events; multiple emission sites; Aluminum; Current measurement; Electrodes; Field emitter arrays; Insulation; Performance evaluation; Predictive models; Silicon; Testing; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electron Device Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0741-3106

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/55.215116

Filename

215116